Summary
The novel opens with a boy worrying that it will rain. As he looks at the blurred scenery of gingko trees, he remembers his brother issuing threats to get him to come back home. He hears a woman announcing a funeral as bodies are brought in from the Red Cross hospital. Thirty coffins will join the twenty-eight coffins that the boy (with the help of others) already laid out in the gym that morning. The boy stands guard at the gym while the service is conducted elsewhere. The sound of singing and sobbing reaches him.
The boy dons his mask and enters the gym, which reeks of death. Thirty-two unidentified bodies lay beside flickering candles. The body of one woman in particular stands out to the boy due to the sheer violence inflicted upon her. The boy replaces a nearby candle and studies the flame. He considers what happens to the soul when the body dies.
Before being housed in the gymnasium, the bodies were kept in the hallway of the complaints department in the Provincial Office. The boy recalls going there to look for his friend's body. Two women working to clean the corpses asked him to stay and volunteer, which is how he ended up as an official record-keeper, noting down dates, times, clothing, and physical characteristics in a ledger.
Rumors that the soldiers will return lead to feelings of fear. Many people decide not to participate in public demonstrations, but others refuse to return home, even if it means death. The boy (whose name is Dong-ho) refuses to return home until he finds his friend, Jeong-dae. However, Dong-ho reveals that he already witnessed his friend get shot. Terrified of snipers, Dong-ho left the scene without attempting to recover his friend's body. Traumatized and guilt-ridden, Dong-ho returned home and remembered all of Jeong-dae's unique and beloved qualities. Dong-ho wonders if one of the corpses in the gym is Jeong-dae's older sister, Jeong-mi.
An old man who snuck into the city comes looking for his family members. Dong-ho leads him inside the gym to examine the bodies.
Analysis
The first chapter, entitled "The Boy, 1980," is told from the second-person point of view of a boy witnessing a mass funeral from a distance. The original Korean title of this chapter translates to "Young Bird." The use of second-person perspective helps connect the reader to the protagonist (a fifteen-year-old boy referred to as "you") and imagine him- or herself in the boy's position as he works to assemble and organize bodies for a mass funeral. While all of the boy's fellow workers attend the service, he is left to keep watch at the gym in case more family members come looking for deceased relatives. This sets the protagonist somewhat apart from everyone else. The reader does not learn his name until later in the chapter when another character calls him by his name, which is Dong-ho.
Death presents a logistical and spiritual problem in the opening scene of the novel. Mass funerals are necessary when a disaster (inflicted by either humans or nature) causes a death toll too high for the victims to be processed individually. On the one hand, this could somewhat flatten the focus on the individual people, each with their own lives, families, hopes, and dreams. However, the occurrence of a mass funeral also clarifies that whatever caused these deaths is a collective issue. Logistical and spiritual issues collide when the boy recalls having to keep count of the coffins for official records in order to ensure that they don't pass through funeral rites twice. Having to examine corpses "systematically" presents the complicated challenge of separating emotions from death. Further, when the Provincial Office became "short of hands," civilians took on the official role of processing the deaths.
The question of nationalism in connection to these deaths comes up in the first chapter. Dong-ho questions why the funeral process involves singing the national anthem and placing the Taegukgi (the national flag) on each coffin when "the nation itself had murdered" these people. Eun-sook, one of the women working to process the bodies, challenges the boy's assertion that the nation is at fault by stating that the generals currently in charge "seized power unlawfully." In other words, the characters debate how laws, ethics, and actions intertwine. Han presents this morally ambiguous problem by offering different perspectives rather than insisting on one definitive answer.
Han touches on how broad political events can shape individual lives not only through her focus on nationalism, but also when she outlines important changes in the South Korean political landscape. Dong-ho recalls a conversation he had with his best friend's older sister, Jeong-mi. Jeong-mi had given up her studies to work and support herself and her younger brother. When President Park was assassinated, Jeong-mi tells Dong-ho that "the world's changed." In the strengthening labor movement, Jeong-mi's bosses at the textile factory could no longer force her to work overtime. Additionally, they might be required to increase the workers' salaries. She sees this as an opportunity to start studying again, which could positively alter the course of her future.
When Dong-ho reveals that he witnessed his best friend Jeong-dae get shot by snipers, he demonstrates a sense of survivor's guilt. Survivor's guilt is a traumatic response to surviving an event that killed others. It often involves intense feelings of guilt and grief. Everyone—including Dong-ho's mother and brother as well as other civilians working alongside Dong-ho—tries to convince him to return home before the soldiers arrive. They all predict that the soldiers will shoot anyone out in the street on sight. The attempt to find his friend's body is futile, but Dong-ho cannot bring himself to go back home.
